BaseDraft

CWE-428Unquoted Search Path or Element

Category: other

Description

The product uses a search path that contains an unquoted element, in which the element contains whitespace or other separators. This can cause the product to access resources in a parent path. If a malicious individual has access to the file system, it is possible to elevate privileges by inserting such a file as "C:\Program.exe" to be run by a privileged program making use of WinExec.

Common consequences· 1

  • Confidentiality / Integrity / Availability — Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands

Potential mitigations· 3

  • [Implementation]Properly quote the full search path before executing a program on the system.
  • [Implementation]
  • [Implementation]Inputs should be decoded and canonicalized to the application's current internal representation before being validated (CWE-180). Make sure that the application does not decode the same input twice (CWE-174). Such errors could be used to bypass allowlist validation schemes by introducing dangerous inputs after they have been checked.

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/428.html

(incoming)2

TypeTargetConfidenceTier
VulnerabilityCVE-2025-10714cve-2025-107140%live
VulnerabilityCVE-2025-12507cve-2025-125070%live

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.

CWE
Untrusted Search Path
CWE
Path Traversal: '\absolute\pathname\here'
CWE
Path Equivalence: 'file name' (Internal Whitespace)
CWE
Path Equivalence: '\multiple\\internal\backslash'
CWE
Path Traversal: 'C:dirname'
CWE
Path Traversal: '....//'
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.